Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalObama absurdly declares Venezuela a security threat
Obama absurdly declares Venezuela a security threat
Channeling Reagan, Obama continues US pressure on Latin American leftist governments
March 10, 2015 12:45PM ET
by Mark Weisbrot - @MarkWeisbrot
Yesterday the White House took a new step toward the theater of the absurd by “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela,” as President Barack Obama put it in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner.
It remains to be seen whether anyone in the White House press corps will have the courage to ask what in the world the nation’s chief executive could mean by that. Is Venezuela financing a coming terrorist attack on U.S. territory? Planning an invasion? Building a nuclear weapon?
Who do they think they are kidding? Some may say that the language is just there because it is necessary under U.S. law in order to impose the latest round of sanctions on Venezuela. That is not much of a defense, telling the whole world the rule of law in the United States is something the president can use lies to get around whenever he finds it inconvenient.
That was the approach of President Ronald Reagan in 1985 when he made a similar declaration in order to impose sanctions — including an economic embargo — on Nicaragua. Like the White House today, he was trying to topple an elected government that Washington didn’t like. He was able to use paramilitary and terrorist violence as well as an embargo in a successful effort to destroy the Nicaraguan economy and ultimately overturn its government. (The Sandinistas eventually returned to power in 2007 and are the governing party today.)
More:
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/obama-absurdly-declares-venezuela-a-national-security-threat.html
Maduro’s “Paranoia” About U.S. Regime-Change in Venezuela
Maduro’s “Paranoia” About U.S. Regime-Change in Venezuela
by Jacob G. Hornberger
March 12, 2015
Good for the Venezuelan domestic opponents of President Nicolas Maduro. Although fiercely opposed to Maduro, they have come out publicly against President Obama’s meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs. According to the Washington Post,
Opposition leaders, who generally are close with the United States, said they rejected the use of unilateral sanctions. “We appreciate and are grateful for the support of the international community, but we neither want nor accept that any of its members take on roles that are ours to assume,” read their statement.
“Just as we reject Cuba’s offensive meddling, we cannot support nor accept any other nation’s,” the statement continued. “This is a struggle among Venezuelans for Venezuela.”
That’s what I call a principled position, unlike the pure, good, old-fashioned hypocrisy that characterizes both U.S. officials and the U.S. mainstream press.
Consider, for example, the mainstream press’s mocking of Maduro for being paranoid about the possibility of a U.S. regime-change operation, one in which Maduro would be violently ousted from power and replaced with a pro-U.S. dictator.
Now, I’m certainly no expert on what constitutes paranoia in a clinical sense but even if Maduro is a paranoiac, that doesn’t necessarily mean that his concerns about U.S. interventionism are irrational. After all, U.S. officials don’t limit their extensive surveillance schemes and their regime-change operations to non-paranoid people. Recall their secret surveillance of Ernest Hemingway.
More:
http://fff.org/2015/03/12/maduros-paranoia-u-s-regime-change-venezuela/
WaPo, Owned by CIA's Webmaster, Blasts Venezuela's 'State-Financed' News
WaPo, Owned by CIA's Webmaster, Blasts Venezuela's 'State-Financed' News
By Jim Naureckas
Mar 12 2015
Venezuelans are worried because US President Barack Obama declared a “national emergency” that called Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
But there’s no need for them to get upset, the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff and Karen DeYoung (3/11/15) reassure. The Obama administration explained that it just wanted to impose sanctions on some of Venezuela’s top officials because “it wanted to send a strong message in defense of human rights and democracy”:
The “emergency” declaration and labeling of Venezuela as a “security threat” are legal formalities used in many other instances when sanctions are applied, administration officials said. The language does not represent a more severe assessment of the Maduro government, they said.
Ah–the administration is just pretending there’s an “unusual and extraordinary threat” because it wants to invoke powers that it’s only legally allowed to use in an actual emergency. No biggie. Thanks for clearing that up, Washington Post!
More:
http://fair.org/blog/2015/03/12/wapo-owned-by-cias-webmaster-blasts-venezuelas-state-financed-news/
General in El Salvador Torture and Killings Can Be Deported, Immigration Court Rules
Source: New York Times
General in El Salvador Torture and Killings Can Be Deported, Immigration Court Rules
By JULIA PRESTON
MARCH 12, 2015
In a decision setting a significant human rights precedent, an immigration appeals court has ruled that a former defense minister of El Salvador, a close ally of Washington during the civil war there in the 1980s, can be deported from the United States because he participated in or concealed torture and murder by his troops.
The decision, published Wednesday by the Board of Immigration Appeals in the case of the former official, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, found that he had a direct role in the abuse and killings of civilians because of his “command responsibility” as the top military officer. It is the first time the highest immigration court has weighed in to interpret a central issue in a human rights law passed in 2004.
The ruling will make it easier to deport foreigners who were top commanders based on violations by soldiers serving under them.
“Congress clearly intended that commanders should be held accountable if their subordinates commit torture and extrajudicial killings,” the panel of three judges wrote.
Among other crimes, the board found that General Vides was directly involved in covering up the role of National Guard troops under his command in the rape and murder of four American churchwomen in December 1980. Those killings, as much as any others by the Salvadoran armed forces during the decade-long war, revealed the rampant violence of the military that Washington staunchly supported in its Cold War confrontation with leftist guerrillas.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/general-in-el-salvador-torture-and-killings-can-be-deported-immigration-court-rules.html?_r=0
Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon
Source: McClatchy Washington Bureau
Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon
By Marisa Taylor and Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Washington Bureau
March 12, 2015 Updated 29 minutes ago
[font size=1]
This photo taken almost 42 years ago shows troops rounding up loyalists to President Salvador Allende. Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, with help from the Nixon administration, toppled an elected leader and ruled from 1973 until 1990. Victims of
repression under Pinochet regime continue to seek justice through Chilean courts. NEW YORK TIMES — New York Times
[/font]
SANTIAGO, Chile — A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past.
Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who sexually tortured him.
Despite knowing of the allegations, State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense University until last year .
Human rights groups also question the school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military commander.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/03/12/259553/chilean-accused-of-murder-torture.html#storylink=cpy
Evidence the DEA Attempted to Alter Testimony on Drug War Massacre in Honduras
Evidence the DEA Attempted to Alter Testimony on Drug War Massacre in Honduras
Wednesday, 11 March 2015 09:53
By Karen Spring, CIP Americas Program | Report
Clara Wood survived a shooting carried out during a joint Honduras-U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) drug interdiction operation in the Moskitia region in eastern Honduras on May 11, 2012. Her 14-year old son, Hasked Brooks Wood, was killed during shooting.
To date, no Honduran or U.S. agents have been held accountable for the death of four Miskitu indigenous people who were assassinated and three who were gravely injured during the attack. Between February and March 2013, three Honduran agents were acquitted for their involvement in the May 2012 incident. Honduran authorities say that the U.S. Embassy refuses to hand over the names of the U.S. agents involved in the massacre, thus obstructing investigation of the case.
New Developments
Beginning in mid-2013, Clara Wood and a family member of a woman killed during the operation began receiving phone calls from a Honduran man that identified himself as ‘Eddie’. Eddie offered to help them, including insisting that they drop their current legal representation and allow him to find them – the survivors and family members – a ‘better’ lawyer to take on their case. He told Clara he had friends in the U.S. Embassy that could help her. He suggested the other survivor, who he was also trying to convince to change legal representation, travel to San Pedro Sula with a woman rumored in Ahuas to traffic sex workers.
On two occasions in February 2014, Mrs. Wood traveled with Eddie to Tegucigalpa for questioning conducted by individuals that she was told were Americans and/or worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration. On the first trip, two U.S. men attempted to convince Mrs. Wood to alter her testimony regarding the series of events that led up to the May 2012 massacre.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29574-evidence-the-dea-attempted-to-alter-testimony-on-drug-war-massacre-in-honduras
Deportation Upheld Of Salvadoran Ex-Official For Torture, Killings
Source: NBC News
Deportation Upheld Of Salvadoran Ex-Official For Torture, Killings
By Suzanne Gamboa
An immigration appeals panel has upheld the deportation order of a former El Salvador defense minister who oversaw the torture and killings of thousands of civilians during that country's bloody civil war.
The Board of Immigration Appeals on Wednesday refused to overturn an immigration judge's order that Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, former defense minister and director of the Salvadoran National Guard, be removed from the U.S. and dismissed his appeal.
The appeals panel agreed that Vides Casanova participated in the tortures and killings of civilians from 1979 to 1989 because he was aware of them during and after the fact, he interfered with investigations of them, failed to prevent them and did not hold perpetrators accountable.
~ snip ~
The U.S. had backed the Salvadoran government during its civil war, so Vides Casanova had argued he should not be removed because he was upholding U.S. policies.
Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/former-el-salvador-defense-ministers-deportation-upheld-n321801
Venezuela, the Latest ‘National Security Threat’
March 11, 2015
Looking for Enemies
Venezuela, the Latest ‘National Security Threat’
by DAVE LINDORFF
Seriously? Venezuela is a “national security threat”?
That is what President Obama has reportedly declared today in a new executive order.
And how exactly is poor Venezuela, a nation of 29 million, with a small military upon which it spends just 1% of GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world (the US spends 4.5% of GDP on its own bloated military), a threat to the US?
Well, according to the new executive order, some of Venezuela’s leading officials have “criminalized political dissent” and are corrupt. That’s about it. There’s nothing in there about Venezuela threatening military action against the US, or promoting terrorism, or threatening Americans.
But hold on. I remember reading in documents obtained through Freedom of Information petitions by the Partnership for Civil Justice from the FBI, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, that back in the fall of 2011, during the Occupy movement that swept the nation, the US national security apparatus, including the NSA and the 72 so-called Fusion Centers that had been set up to link federal, state and local intelligence organizations in all major US cities devoted most of its domestic intelligence and police resources to spying on, infiltrating, and ultimately crushing a purely peaceful wave of political protest against the rampant corruption of the political class and the banking industry.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/11/venezuela-the-latest-national-security-threat/
Sea-Change in Venezuela
March 11, 2015
What to Make of the White House's Recent Declarations?
Sea-Change in Venezuela
by CHRIS GILBERT
Caracas.
When President Maduro responded to the recent White House executive order declaring Venezuela to be a national security threat, saying first that it was a “Frankenstein” and later that it was “schizophrenic,” he may have made small errors regarding both literature and psychiatry, but his point was clear enough: Obama’s decree is a bit like Frankenstein’s monster (a hodgepodge) and it indeed comes from a government with a split-personality.
In fact, U.S. politics, like that of most Northern governments, is deeply irrational. This is in part because it is concerted among various oligarchical interests and monopoly groups, making the official discourse really something of an epiphenomenon. Yet it is also because the political sphere obeys discordant, heterogeneous time-frames.
U.S. politics’ profound internal clock – which ticks away in the country’s innards – is that of capital accumulation. The demands of capital accumulation, when they irrupt on the surface of usual national and international politics (with its quotidian fare of summits, elections, and everyday lawmaking) produce strange effects that defy the rationality of this more visible arena.
Take the case of the U.S.’s policies regarding Venezuela. This country’s recent political panorama has been defined, in the first place, by a Bolivarian reformist government that has opted for a Chinese-style project of gradually diversifying its productive apparatus and, in the second place, by a right-wing opposition that (because it was tacitly consulted on the government’s reforms) was inclined to wait patiently for upcoming elections, in which it projected important successes.
Abruptly, this has all undergone a sea-change. In months, if not weeks, the older scenario has given way to a situation marked by widespread political disobedience on the part of the opposition, a graver economic situation, alarming information about coups d’etat, and now open U.S. interference.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/11/sea-change-in-venezuela/
Obama Channels His Inner Reagan on Venezuela
March 11, 2015
How to Create an “Extraordinary National Security Threat”
Obama Channels His Inner Reagan on Venezuela
by MARK WEISBROT
On Monday, the White House took a new step toward the theater of the absurd by “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela,” as President Barack Obama put it in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner.
It remains to be seen whether anyone in the White House press corps will have the courage to ask what in the world the nation’s chief executive could mean by that. Is Venezuela financing a coming terrorist attack on U.S. territory? Planning an invasion? Building a nuclear weapon?
Who do they think they are kidding? Some may say that the language is just there because it is necessary under U.S. law in order to impose the latest round of sanctions on Venezuela. That is not much of a defense, telling the whole world the rule of law in the United States is something the president can use lies to get around whenever he finds it inconvenient.
That was the approach of President Ronald Reagan in 1985 when he made a similar declaration in order to impose sanctions — including an economic embargo — on Nicaragua. Like the White House today, he was trying to topple an elected government that Washington didn’t like. He was able to use paramilitary and terrorist violence as well as an embargo in a successful effort to destroy the Nicaraguan economy and ultimately overturn its government. (The Sandinistas eventually returned to power in 2007 and are the governing party today.)
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/11/obama-channels-his-inner-reagan-on-venezuela/
Profile Information
Member since: 2002Number of posts: 160,524